> in. Why is it that no undeveloped nation can modernize? Why do so many of
> these countries have a good decade or two, come close, but then fade away?
Lots have in the EU and East Asia, it's just that you've got the have the gumption to (1) assemble a vast list of everything the IMF-World Bank-neolibs say you should do (privatize, downsize, polarize), and (2) do just the opposite (i.e. socialize, subsidize, plebianize).
One passing thought: modernity is a strange, multi-splendored thing, which doesn't necessarily correlate to GDP rankings. Pretty much every nation has modernized; even the Taliban are (admittedly dismal) agents of modernization in that sense, transforming a village-patriarchal culture into one governed by abstract juridical concepts executed by a national administrative apparatus, while even the most remote Indonesian and Chinese agrarian producers are probably more integrated into the world-market (watch TV, etc.) than the French peasants of the 1850s were vis-a-vis French capitalism. This cultural plebianization (multiculturalism, immigration, diversity, etc.) is one of the most remarkable and positive features of multinational capitalism; it's sort of the unassailable revolutionary base area of the Global Resistance, as it were, which Capital can't touch, no matter how many media channels it throws at us.
-- Dennis